July 07, 2014

Skye Allen: Pretty Peg

First
of all, Chris, thank you for letting me visit the awesomeness that is
your site! I love your writing and I’m so excited to be here today.

My
YA fantasy novel Pretty
Peg came out in June
with Harmony Ink Press. Before we plunge into the excerpt, let me
share a little bit about the story. Josy is the youngest of three
sisters, and when we meet her, she’s just starting her senior year
in high school in Oakland, CA. Her oldest sister was murdered 6
months ago while doing humanitarian work in Afghanistan, and her
whole family is rocked by grief. Josy has to become a hero – even
though she’d just like to get on with her life and possibly find a
girlfriend (spoiler: she finds one!).

I
was all inspired by fairy tales when I was writing Pretty
Peg, and I love the
idea that the youngest and most overlooked sibling in a seemingly
cursed family is the one who saves the day. Josy is an unlikely hero
– she’s plus-sized and she doesn’t see herself as beautiful,
even though others do. She’s used to taking the back seat in her
own life because her family is so needy. But during the course of the
story she uncovers the inner strength she needs to do her heroic
thing and also to come out the other side changed for the better. I
hope you like her as much as I do.

Blurb:High school senior Josy
Grant already had plenty on her plate before she found the magic
puppet theater her murdered sister left behind. Despite Josy’s
grief, the responsibility of taking care of her family falls to her,
and being queer doesn’t make dealing with school any easier. Things
only get worse when sexy new girl Nicky tells Josy her sister died at
the hands of a mysterious figure from the Faerie Realm called the
Woodcutter, and if they can’t stop him, Josy and her remaining
sister will be next.

They
have just days before the Woodcutter strikes again on the autumn
equinox, so Josy follows Nicky into the Faerie Realm to hunt him.
Along the way, she discovers Fey gifts of her own and answers to the
questions that have driven the Grant family apart. Nothing comes for
free when dealing with Fey, though, and those gifts and answers might
come at a terrible price.

Excerpt
from Pretty Peg:

I
ordered a café au lait and settled in at a rickety table next to the
palm tree on the patio. The place to sit at Fern’s Bleedingheart
Lounge, café by day, bar by night, was out back. You could watch the
outfits coming in the door, and the passion vine-covered chain-link
fence kept out the wind. I breathed in sweet steam and stacked my
homework in dessert order, English last.

“Josephine
Grant.” I looked up. Leaning against my palm tree, in a David Bowie
T-shirt and carpenter pants cut off at the knees, was Nicky. The girl
from school. She had a halo. I looked more carefully and realized
there were white Christmas lights in the tree behind her, making her
curly brown hair glow.

“Guilty.
Hi again.”

“Hi.
Cool hair, by the way.”

I’d
forgotten about my hair. I touched it to remind myself what was
different. Pink, that was it. “Thanks, it’s, uh, actually my
natural color. I’m letting it grow in.”

“So
do I get you?” Her dark eyes crinkled.

“Huh?”
She can’t be hitting
on me.

She
pointed a silver-ringed finger at my bag, where the drama club flyer
was sticking out. “For senior service at the theater. Don’t tell
me you got all beguiled by tutoring or something worthy since lunch.”
She hooked the other chair with her foot and dropped into it.

“Oh
right. I actually am a tutor, but yeah.” I unfolded the pink flyer
over my knees and discovered the paper horse from the puppet theater
tucked into it. I must have put it in my bag when I left the house.
Weird. I didn’t remember that.

Nicky
snatched the horse out of my lap with a gasp like she’d been
stabbed with a safety pin. “So you know.” Her voice didn’t
rise, but it rang out. A couple at the next table jerked their heads
up from their laptops.

“Know
what?” I didn’t like how she’d just grabbed it like that. My
hands went toward hers, but I stopped before I touched her. Could she
tell? About me? That I liked girls?

It
didn’t matter. Out of my league. I swallowed and hoped my face
wasn’t as red as it felt.

She
turned the horse over, tracing the little strip of gold tape on the
base. “Pretty Peg,” she murmured. Her features were drawn inward,
like she’d forgotten I was there. A ripple went through the horse’s
metallic ribbon mane, and its legs stirred. I thought it was the
wind, and I slapped my hand down on my papers on the cool metal
table, but the air was still and heavy with the smell from the fire
pit next door at Vulcan.

She
seemed to shake herself back to reality. She met my eyes. “So you
know all about it. We only have a few days.” Her voice was firm,
matter-of-fact.

She
must be off her meds or something. “Uh,
I found this puppet theater last night in my garage. My sister made
it. That’s where that horse came from. I don’t know what you’re
talking about.”

“Not
the first.” She said it to her hands, still stroking the horse’s
blue spine. Then to me, in a clear voice: “You really don’t? Know
about the toy theater?”

“No.”

“Okay.
This is so not graceful. Let me start at the top. You see, I already
know you. Your family. I knew your sister Margaret.”

I
just stared at her. You
know my whole family?
Something about the calm in her voice stirred me into a panic. I
dropped my hands into my lap, one hot from my coffee, one cold. I
looked at her, her face pleading, dense eyebrows drawn together over
brown eyes that looked bronze in the sun. Her T-shirt collar was
ragged against the smooth V where her collarbones met. The skin there
was darker. I averted my eyes so I couldn’t get caught staring.

Nicky
sat up straight then, nodded with her eyes locked on mine, balanced
the horse upright on her palm. Blew out air through her plump lips.
David Bowie rose and fell. “I barely know you, not really. I know
you don’t know me. But I have to tell you something. You’re not
going to believe it, but you have to believe it.”

Margaret
was in the CIA. She’s still alive in a cave somewhere in Pakistan.
She was really a man.

“Okay.”
I slurped my drink and made a go-on gesture with my free hand.
“Talk.”

She
began, “What you know about your sister’s life and her death,
that’s not the full story. There is a—it’s hard to explain.
Another world beside the one you know. There are creatures you can’t
imagine, tastes that can haunt you until you’re hungry forever.”
Her voice drifted off, and her long fingers drew restless circles in
a patch of spilled sugar.

“Margaret
was killed in Afghanistan while she was working with Doctors Without
Borders. In the spring.” Saying “in the spring” made it easier
on whoever I talked to. If I said “on March 20, 2012, five months
and six days ago, on the road near her office, after curfew.” I
usually got a follow-up lecture about prescription medication or the
five stages of grief. I was doing fine on my own. I missed Margaret,
but I had my hands full taking care of Mom.

Besides,
I didn’t want to start getting deep into my own feelings. That raw
egg could break at any time.

Nicky
shifted in her chair and met my eyes. She clasped her hands together
on the table and said, “I’m really sorry to take you by surprise
with this. Your sister was loved, you can’t imagine. But that’s
not exactly what happened to her.”

“So
she was up in some kind of rave scene? Like drugs?” My heroic
sister was a drug addict. It made a twisted kind of sense: look at
Mom’s deep and abiding relationship with prescription painkillers.

Nicky
was laughing. “Oh, there are folk who would not be flattered by
that. No.” She drew in a long breath through her wide nostrils.
“Did Pretty Peg—did Margaret ever talk to you about magic?”

“Magic.
Nope.” I was annoyed. This conversation was going in a sales-pitch
direction that didn’t make me comfortable. I hoped she wasn’t
going to ask me to go to the Wiccan bookstore or accept Jesus into my
heart.

“Your
sister was—hurt when she was a child. By someone close to her.”
She looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. I was pretty clear
on what she was talking about. It was the big family deal, the other
subject we didn’t discuss because it made Mom cry. When he was
sixteen and she was twelve, Robert molested Margaret. That was why he
and my dad moved out. Mom and Dad decided it was best to isolate him
from the rest of us instead of putting him into the system. They
weren’t technically divorced, but you couldn’t deny that our
family was broken.

Nicky
went on: “She escaped into a kind of magical place—well, the
whole world has magic. She escaped to our world. And the Fair Folk
came to love her. Oh, I knew this would be hard to explain.”

“Fair
folk? You mean like carnies?” My mind showed me a movie of Margaret
with a trucker’s hat and a smoker’s cough, selling tickets to a
rickety roller coaster. No way.

She
kept talking as if I hadn’t interrupted. “And she loved them too,
but she got caught up in some trouble she never should have been part
of.” Now she met my eyes with her wide round ones. “And she
died.”

I
was getting angry. “Look, Margaret got killed by some random guy.
He hasn’t been caught. They did think it could be an insurgent, but
it could just as easily have been some psycho. They have those
everywhere. A lot of people are willing to believe something like
that could only happen in a place like Kabul, but there’ve been
close to a hundred murders so far this year in Oakland alone, not to
mention all the—”

She
cut me off. “She was killed by the Woodcutter. An enemy of the
Summer Folk.” She passed a silver-ringed hand across her mouth when
she looked at the confusion that must have been on my face. “My
people. You would call them fairies.”

Oh.
She’s messing with me. That’s what this is. Furious
tears blurred my eyes, and I tilted my head back so she wouldn’t
see. I said to the palm leaves over my head, “Okay. I’m going
home.” When I was sure I wasn’t going to really cry, I started
pulling my books together, not looking at Nicky. I added, “So that
whole drama club thing was fake?”

“I
confess I thought if I could get you to the theater, I wouldn’t
have quite so much to explain. I shouldn’t have pretended. Please.
Listen. I came here to help.” She held down my spiral notebook as I
tried to slide it toward me.

“Yeah,
I really don’t need help.”

“You
actually do, and you don’t know you do, and that makes it worse and
more dangerous. Just let me explain.” The steely note in her voice
made me stop moving and watch her face.

“I’ll
buy that you knew my sister, or you know something about her, or
whatever, but she’s gone. Leave her alone.” I stood up.

“Meet
me at the theater after school tomorrow, and I can show you what I’m
talking about.” She held my gaze with brown dog eyes, liquid and
too beautiful to be wasted on a mean crazy person.

I
looked away. “Oh, too bad. Tuesday’s actually my support group
for people who believe in unicorns.”

“You
think the dolls in the toy theater are being moved by Pretty Peg.”

My
mind went swimmy as I worked that out. I hadn’t told anyone besides
Laura about the puppet theater.

But
yes, that was what I secretly half suspected, even though I knew it
was impossible. That my dead sister was somehow talking to me.

“How
do you know about that?” I asked.

“Just
come tomorrow. Come and I’ll show you. You do need our help.” Her
voice was pleading. She stepped in closer, and I smelled cinnamon.

“I’m
fine.”

“No,
you’re not. But we can protect you.”

“Protect
me from what exactly?” I slung my bag across my chest.

She
took a breath and pierced me with a look. “Not just you. You were
right about one thing. The Woodcutter was never caught. He’s
looking for you and your sister Laura.”

Skye
Allen has had short fiction published in Toasted
Cheese Literary Journal
and Of
Dragons and Magic: Tales of the Lost Worlds
and poetry in Insomnia
and
Sinister
Wisdom.
She works as a singing teacher and occasionally performs Irish music
around the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her wife, two
cats, and four chickens. Pretty
Peg is
her first novel.